


Duodecimo

by Plouton



Category: Bleach
Genre: One Shot, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Vague, but post-canon about a pre-canon event
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 01:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20267689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plouton/pseuds/Plouton
Summary: Though eventually they came willingly, very few know how Aizen forced them to bend the knee.





	Duodecimo

Duodecimo

_Aizen’s army was birthed from trauma. Broken mask for broken hearts._

As his lips curled back, around razor sharp teeth, knives between his lips, an insult on his tongue, you noticed something you’d never spotted before. An interesting pattern bathed in light.

On the visible side, the side exposed to the world, his teeth were grooved. Canines and molars alike share a set of abrasions, holes, a perfect pair of circles, worn deep into the pulpy – nerve filled cavity of the tooth. Painful. So much so that eating would have been impossible, and the press of a tongue excruciating. So, so easy to infect. To let fester.

_They are recognizable wounds, observed in the clinic many years ago, only now the faintest tickle of a memory. The small child carrying the diseased animal into the clinic. Please. Please help him. Your dad didn’t have the heart to tell her that he was only a human doctor._

“Whatever he had been chewing on had tension to it. It wrapped around the teeth” and the teeth warped around it. “They are all the same diameter,” thin. Wire.

He caught you looking. Jaw grinding closed, fury. Fear. When he moved you did not resist, simply let him drive you back against the wall, a hand around your throat, the tips of his fingers pulling at the fine orange hair at the base of your neck. He pressed his lips closed, could not speak without revealing more. From this distance, barely a foot apart, you could see the groves in his mask as well. How, you wonder, did you ever miss these scars in the first place, simply because they were carved into his heart and bones instead of his skin.

Grimmjow didn’t look like the kind of person who could possibly get caught in something as simple as a snare. After all, it was nothing but a thin metal zip-tie, a human invention. A fragile trick when compared his powerful claws. It should not have left those scars. Out of all the dangers in a hollow would expect in Heuco Mundo, a wire hidden under the shifting sands was not one of them. Aizen introduced them to many things, and his introduction started with pain.

It tightend, tightend, tightened the more he struggled. A noose. It strangles the animal so the hunter needs not do anything once he returns to his trap. The animal kills itself. It does the hard work for him.

Fitting, then, that a man like Aizen use such a tool. Was that not the perfect metaphor for his grip on Heuco Mundo? Strangling, strangling, strangling until it was to die under his hand?

Though staring up at Grimmjow, his jaw closed so tight the tendon might snap, and mask turned away from your view, you know something else happened here.

Maybe the snare wasn’t very tight, or something was looped around it. An object? A leg?

No.

No. Grimmjow wore the scars he earned from his own survival with... Not pride, but worth. Weight. They might be the most valuable thing he owns. He has never bothered hiding them before because they are proof he _survive_, when so many others have not. The one across his torso, from shoulder to hip. The crescent white line along the base of his throat. The burns on his wrists. He never let Orihime heal any of them, even after she offered.

“These are mine,” he growled, imposing and predatory, hiding under a layer of threat.

So for him to turn away and jock his jaw. He could not fight you while hiding these.

So, no. It was something else. Maybe… Maybe it wasn’t around him at all, the direction of the groves abrasions suggested perhaps that the wire was around someone else.

Grimmjow did not speak of his fracción. They followed him into battle and they died. That was all you really knew of them. Only once have you ever heard anything about them. Once, when you were fighting a horde of Quincy side by side in the confusion of battle, Grimmjow had growled something, dodged in such an unusual – practiced – way and then stumbled when whatever follow up, whatever support he was expecting didn’t come, that you knew something was missing for him. A person at his side. Under his breath, he hissed a name like an apology.

Carefully. Slowly, you reached a hand to his jaw, a pair of fingers tracing gently across the skin, waiting for him. Blue eyes, filled with an emotion you couldn’t quite place, watched you. He did not stop you, so you turned him, softly until you could see. It struck you, that you had never touched his mask before. Everything is different after war. These scars are from before he was an Arrancar, then. Before he had fingers and a sword and the strength to fight an army.

You could see it now. The angle of the cuts. He had used his teeth, jaws around metal when his claws had failed. He pulled and pulled. The back and forth motion, wearing into the teeth of his mask, the teeth of his mouth.

He must have been at it for a long time. At least a night. Probably longer with how deep the cuts are and how strong his hierro would have been. Under the hollow mask you can only sort of imagine, his human teeth and human lips, soft, too soft for the desert, would have been carved bloody. He would have been badly cut.

You wonder how badly injured the other hollow must have been. Would this have been a sign of weakness? To have a heart in an uncaring desert?

_You think of the festering jaw of the dying animal on your clinic floor. There was nothing your father could do. _

Had he more time, Grimmjow might have met the same fate. Infection poisoning his blood and necrotizing his flesh. If hollows can even suffer from infection. He might have simply carved through his entire jaw. Desperation in every pained jerk.

He releases you suddenly, two steps back and a sonido. Running now when he could not then.

Aizen never gave him the time. There was no choice at all.

Before he was sexta, he was less.

**Author's Note:**

> I recently saw this little comic on tumblr about a coyote's death carve into his teeth. 
> 
> You should read it here: https://arsanatomica.tumblr.com/post/186577616682
> 
> Its very vague and no I'm not going to fix it, but this is the story of about Shawlong and Grimmjow.


End file.
